!Women Art Revolution Documents 40 Years of Feminist Art

After conducting a penis count of major NYC art institutions in the '80s, activist group Guerilla Girls asked, Do ladies have to be naked to get into the Met? Only five percent of the exhibited artists were women while 85 percent of the nudes were female. While we haven't done an exact tally, we're confident that Miami's weenie count is pretty balanced in comparison.

Think of local art superstars Christy Gast, Agustina Woodgate, Jillian Mayer, Susan Lee-Chun and Jen Stark. Add to that major curators like Bonnie Clearwater and Ruba Katrib at MOCA, and gallerists like Bernice Steinbum, and our feminist art report card looks pretty good. But it wasn't always this way. A documentary, !War Art Revolution, which catalogs the feminist art movement, is screening at three of Miami's indie theaters this weekend.

artists for over 40 years. Her latest, !W.AR., documents how their work was

discredited by art programs, galleries, and museums for decades. Leeson herself sold one of her pieces in the

mid-70s, only to have the collector return it when he found out she was a

woman.

With an original score by Carrie Bowenstein (of Sleater Kinney and Wild

Flag), the film is a collection of interviews with dozens (frankly, too

many) feminist artists, female curators,

and tenured art professors. It traces back to

early activism like a protest at the Whitey where feminist artists

projected their artwork on the outside of the building and placed eggs

inside the walls where their work was ignored.

Censored from the white, male art world, women sought out rooms of their own

by starting their own magazines, galleries, and academic programs. Judy Chicago, while

developing the first female art program at Fresno Sate,

noticed women were

immediately drawn to "act out" via performance art. Another interviewed artist backs this up with "There's a long tradition of women being looked upon. Performance art was a way of looking back." (Interestingly, most of Miami's major female artists work in performance.)

In a scene from 1990, House representatives

spend an hour and half raging against vagina art as

porn via a bill censoring Chicago's The Dinner Party as a pornographic

collection of ceramic "vaginal areas." A highlight of the film, Rep. Ron Dellums, who once

curated an exhibit of Vietnam war crimes outside his

Congressional office, retorts with "Pornography are military weapons that